


And the Winner Is

by ThoughtfulConstellations



Category: Marvel, Marvel (Comics), Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, The Avengers - Ambiguous Fandom
Genre: Cards Against Humanity, Gen, Team Bonding, Team Dynamics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-05
Updated: 2014-11-05
Packaged: 2018-02-24 06:36:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,035
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2571734
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThoughtfulConstellations/pseuds/ThoughtfulConstellations
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One night, the Avengers think it's a great idea to play Cards Against Humanity.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And the Winner Is

**Author's Note:**

> This oneshot was inspired by this post on Tumblr: http://deafclintbarton.co.vu/post/101844639205/morethanprinceofcats-bonzai-bunny-i-want-to
> 
> (I took this from the Tumblr post I reblogged, so if you want to follow me, that's my blog.)
> 
> Anyway, let me know what you think because this is different from anything I've written before.
> 
> Enjoy!

“Why is this a good idea again?” Natasha holds her cards up close in front of her face and looks out at the rest of her teammates.

“It’s fun, and we need to catch Rogers up on modern humor. Also, Thor doesn’t get Midgardian humor, so that’s what this is,” Stark replies.  He looks really fucking proud of himself, and Natasha just suppresses a quiet sigh.  She watches Steve pick up the Cards of Humanity box lid and calmly regard it without giving anything away on his face.

“Oh, this is going to be fantastic,” Clint chuckles.  He looks over at Thor. “You good on the rules?”

“Yes,” Thor answers with a serious look on his face.  Natasha feels bad for him because he’s being forced to play this dumb game, and he looks very serious about the task at hand.

“How many rounds of this are we going to do?” Banner interjects.

“However many rounds until we see who has the most fucked up sense of humor,” Stark replies, still looking really fucking proud of himself. “Ten bucks says it’s Barton.”

“Definitely Barton,” Natasha murmurs in response.  Clint smiles at the honor, but he doesn’t say anything, smirking as if he has a secret.

“Here we go.” Stark draws a card and places it down.

_What is Batman’s guilty pleasure?_

Natasha looks down at her cards and studies them.  The whole team has gone quiet as they look at their cards to decide.  Stark’s lost his smirk and has taken on a very serous expression, suddenly switching on his game face, and even Clint is looking focused on the task at hand. Banner is the first one to put his card down, and then Thor, Natasha, and Clint follow after.

Stark flips all the cards over and looks at them. “ _The entire Internet._ What?  Who did this one?  This is literal.  Cap, was this you? Because that’s not the point of this game.”

“That was mine.” Thor raises his hand with a very solemn face.

“The point is to be funny,” Stark explains.  Thor shifts his weight as if he’s suddenly very uncomfortable.

“I like answering the question,” he says.

“But that’s not the point,” Tony argues. “This game is supposed to showcase your fucked up sense of humor.  Are you trying to tell me you don’t have one?  Because I don’t buy it.” Thor just gives him a look, and Tony shrugs as he moves to the next card. “ _Sarah Palin._ Ok, who did that?”

Banner raises his hand with a tiny smile. “Mine.”

Stark grins. “I love it.” He keeps reading. “ _Pulling out_.”

“That’s mine,” Natasha volunteers before he even asks. 

He snickers. “Ok, good one, Romanoff.  It’s kind of literal and metaphorical all at the same time, so I can dig it. _BEES?_ ” Clint raises his hand. “Kind of disappointed in you, Barton.  I don’t know if that’s supposed to be a play on bats.” He flips the last one over, and his eyes nearly pop out of his head before he starts cracking up. “ _Harry Potter erotica_.”

It suddenly dawns on everyone who put that card down, and they all look at Steve, who’s looking as innocent as he possibly can.  Stark realizes it, too, and he stops laughing as Steve just keeps a calm, straight face.

“What?” Steve asks.

“Cap, that was _ridiculously_ inappropriate,” Tony says.  Steve’s face doesn’t change because everyone’s looking impressed and surprised all at once. He shrugs, looking mildly defensive.

“I’ve read Harry Potter,” he says. “I had a quiet weekend, so I thought…why not? I wanted to watch the movies, but I didn’t want to see them until after I’d read the books.”

“It so doesn’t surprise me that you’re one of _those_ book-to-movie people,” Clint says with a snort and an eye roll. “But how do you know about erotica.”

Steve finally cracks a smile. “Not dead yet, Hawkeye.”

“Ok, Rogers, you win this round.” Tony tosses the card in the Super Soldier’s direction and nods to Clint, who’s sitting on his left and waiting to go. Everyone draws a new card as Clint flips a new one over.

_What has been making life difficult at the nudist colony?_

Natasha slaps hers down immediately.  Banner follows right after, matching Stark.  Thor and Steve are last, the both of them looking wary and almost a little worried.  Clint turns over the cards and grins at all of them.

“Wow,” he says. “ _Balls. Poorly timed Holocaust jokes. God.  Daddy issues. Small pox blankets._ ” It takes him a few moments to stop laughing, but finally, he does. “Oh, man. Ok, these are good. Wait, who did _Poorly timed Holocaust jokes_?”

Banner gives a guilty nod. “Too soon?”

“Too soon,” Steve speaks up with an apologetic shrug. Natasha feels a little guilty about that card, and she wasn’t even the one to put it down. For Steve, the Holocaust was like, last year, not an event that none of them ever got to see.

“ _Balls_ ,” Clint reads out loud. “Natasha.”

“Guilty as charged,” she says.

“Thor, did you say _Small pox blankets_?” Clint asks.  The Asgardian nods, his face still serious.

“If you are living in a nudist colony, then having a blanket might defeat the purpose of living in a nudist colony, therefore making life more complicated,” he explains.  Clint lifts his eyebrows and tilts his head to the side as he studies the blond alien.

“Thor, this is a game,” he says. “Where you’re funny.  You don’t have to answer the questions _literally_.”

“I like answering them literally,” Thor replies.  Natasha watches Clint try to decide whether or not he’s going to pursue this one any more, and he sighs and shakes his head.

“Ok,” the archer finally says. “You can take them literally.”

“Can I ask why?” Banner asks, piping up from his side of the table.

“It makes sense to take them literally.  It’s a riddle,” Thor explains.  He looks somewhat relieved that someone has taken an interest in why he wants to answer the question with a real answer.  Banner nods in a way that shows he’s trying to be polite, but he exchanges a look with Tony that shows he doesn’t get it when Thor isn’t looking.

“Wait, I’m going to have to go with _God_ ,” Clint finally decides. “That one’s hilarious.”

Steve raises his hand, and Natasha would say that he actually looks smug as everyone realizes that it was him who, again, won this round.

“Oh my God,” Tony says. “You’re funny.  That was actually a funny answer.”

“It happens,” Steve replies, reaching across the table and eagerly taking the card from Clint as his prize.  Natasha has to admit that it’s nice seeing the serious Super Soldier smile and loosen up; it’s even nicer for her to see his sense of humor since everyone generally writes him off as being so serious all the time. It actually doesn’t surprise her that he’s read Harry Potter the way it seems to surprise everyone else; she understands what it’s like to want to catch up.

“My turn,” she announces after drawing a new card.  She flips the new card over and places it down.

 _I never truly understood _____________ until I encountered ____________.

She waits for everyone to slap their cards down; she takes the time to study each person’s face.  Stark looks like he’s going to die he’s hiding his grin so hard.  Clint looks kind of confused, Thor has his concentration face on, Banner is smiling, and Steve looks like he’s listening to classic music he’s so calm. Eventually, they set their cards down one by one.  Natasha picks them up and turns them over.

 _“I never truly understood swiftly achieving orgasm until I encountered Helen Keller_ ,” she reads out with a smirk. She goes through the rest of them. “ _I never truly understood a moment of silence until I encountered the Trail of Tears.  I never truly understood old-people smell until I encountered Barack Obama.  I never truly understood my vagina until I encountered blank—“_

“BEES?,” Clint finishes.  She makes a face at her partner.

“Bees?” she asks. “Again?”

“You can’t go wrong with bees,” he protests with a shrug.

“Then why haven’t you won yet?” she counters.  Clint twists his mouth to the side and doesn’t answer. Natasha’s at the last card, so she flips it over and reads. “ _I never fully understood—“_ She stops reading and looks up at Steve, who’s still wearing that infuriatingly calm expression. “No.”

“Yeah,” he says.

“ _No_ ,” she insists, and he just smiles, quiet and sweet the way he always does.

“What?” Stark asks.  Natasha’s quiet for a few seconds, and then she clears her throat, frowning down at her cards.

 _“I never fully understood doin’ it in the butt until I encountered genetically-enhanced super soldiers_.” Her voice shakes, but she manages to make it through.  When she’s done, she looks up at the team and sees all of them staring with wide-eyed realization that Steve was the one to put that down. A few more seconds pass, and then all at once, they dissolve into laughter.  It’s loud and rough and painful, but they’re all laughing so hard they’re crying, and Tony’s pouring Steve a tall glass of the strongest liquor he has in the Tower.

“It goes without saying that Steve wins,” Natasha chokes out with tears streaming down her face.  Off to her left, Thor has completely lost it, and he’s covering his eyes as he laughs warmly and deeply.  She tosses the card to Steve, who takes it and drops it happily onto his pile of cards. “Rogers, I have to say that I’m proud of you.”

“Captain America got game!” Clint crows with his own dirty laugh. Steve just smiles and accepts it, looking as proud as he deserves to feel.

The night goes on, and it just gets weirder.  It doesn’t take long before everyone realizes that Thor will not answer unless he has something that actually fits the question because he really does like to think of this game as a clever way of creating Midgardian riddles, Clint will answer bees to anything with whatever chance he has, Tony and Banner always do something dirty, but it’s Steve who has the most fucked up sense of humor out of all of them.  Whether it’s a sex joke to a very politically incorrect joke that he would never actually say out loud, he wins the award for most fucked up humor.

At the end of the night, Steve’s the winner with Banner as a runner-up, followed by a tie between Stark and Natasha, Clint in fourth, and Thor in last place.  Even though Thor loses, he’s ridiculously proud of himself, and he shoots out a text to Jane to tell her that he received fifth and is proud to have achieved the honor, despite the fact that it was technically a lose.

After staying up and drinking for another hour or so, they decide to call it a night with the promise of continuing the next round next weekend. Steve is non-committal about it, which he shouldn’t be since he won by a _landslide_ , Natasha thinks.  All of the Avengers start to go back to their floors and call it a night when Natasha’s walking with Clint up to their floor, and she stops Steve in the hall. “Hey. I didn’t know you had that much of a…wild sense of humor.”

Steve smiles, and he looks down at the ground. “I’m pretty good at censoring myself.”

“Bet you I win next week,” she challenges, the corners of her mouth turning up into a smile.  Steve looks up, and for a second, it appears he’s about to say no since he kind of politely said no earlier, but then he smiles.

“We’ll see about that,” he says.  He turns and walks away as Natasha looks up at Clint with her own smile. The archer slings an arm around her shoulder, and they start off to their own floor at the very top of the Stark Tower.

“Rogers,” she says. “Who would’ve known?”

“It’s always the quiet ones,” Clint sighs. “Always the quiet ones.”


End file.
